In this direction, several authentication protocols have been proposed for vehicular fog infrastructures. For example, Kang et al. [1]} proposed a privacy-preserved pseudonym scheme to address the location privacy issues in VFC. Likewise, Yao et al. [2]} presented a three-layered framework to ensure the reliability and security of VFC while preserving its performance. Considering the importance of vehicular crowdsensing in transportation, Wei et al. [3]} proposed a fog-based privacy-preserving scheme for conditional road surface monitoring. In a similar direction, Basudan et al. [4]} also devised a privacy-preserving protocol to enhance the security of the vehicular crowdsensing network. To provide secure data transmission in VFC, Wang et al. [5]} proposed a reliable and privacy-preserving task recomposition based on Paillier encryption. In [6]}, Kong et al. also used homomorphic Paillier cryptosystem to design a secure querying scheme for data dissemination in VFC. Likewise, a new privacy-preserving route-sharing scheme for VFC was devised in [7]} to protect user and group privacy. Although several authentication schemes exists in the literature, most of them fail to provide data auditability, in case the central server crashes. Moreover, the existing approaches also incurs high computational cost and communication overhead due to large number of interactions among users and data centers [8]}.
